Stupid Nurse Trick... Don't try this at home... or work!

I was going to change IV tubings on my patient -- all six drips. I had my arms full of drips (including the NTG in a glass bottle) when I stepped on a toy truck (that's ONE good reason not to let small children visit the ICU, especially unsupervised!) and stumbled, dropping a few of the drips -- including, of course, the NTG. Now I KNOW better than this, but I was in such a hurry to clean up the mess so the child who was crawling around upsupervised wouldn't get into it that I picked up the glass with my bare hands.

And when I woke up, I was bleeding where I'd cut myself on the broken glass covered with NTG. That was truly embarressing, and the headache was miserable!

Well, I had put some capsasin (sp?) cream on my hands for aching and didn't take off my ring. That wasn't too bad, but later that day my husband and I were ... shall I say enjoying each other's company.... and the mood was abruptly broken when the burning started....and this was after a good handwashing from getting out from under my wedding ring.

Your poor husband!

But that was still funny.

I'm really clumsy at times, and during the olympics a couple of years ago, I was talking to the patient while we were watching the figure skating. I was imitating the skater who was on, got caught in her IV tubing (thankfully not attached at the time) and did about the most ungraceful swan dive ever!

Speaking of clumsy! I was once prepping a lady for a cardiac cath, and while shaving her, got the bed a little wet. So, she got up to go to the bathroom, while I went to get new bedding. I came back in the room (it was a double, separated by a curtain).

The patient had just come out of the bathroom, and I was in a hurry so I could change her bed and get her back in it. There was a visitor chair on the other side of the curtain that I didn't see. As I was walking by it, one of my feet got caught between the chairlegs. I had an armload full of bedding, and I didn't see it coming, so I wasn't quick enough to even attempt to break my fall. I landed first on my knees on a hard concrete floor, as my face slammed into the side of the bed.

The other nurses came running in, thinking from the loud crashing noises that the patient had fallen. The other nurses saw the patient standing there pointing at me on the floor, and they all just laughed and walked away.

Meanwhile I was still writhing on the floor in real pain! No real injury, but I got a beauty of a black eye, and it took a few weeks before my knees stopped hurting!

I was on assignment (travel nursing) and was leaving my assignment housing at 0430 to go to work.
I was thinking about the day ahead, not paying attention to what I was doing. Well, the housing on my previous two assignments had been first floor apts. This apt was a "garden level" -half a flight of stairs up.
Well, I walked straight out the front door and fell down the stairs.

I was so dazed from the fall, I was unable to get up for about ten mins. I got my clean white pants and shoes filthy.
I had large lumps, bruises, and scrapes all over my body for about two weeks.

Luckily, I'd been leaving the house early the morning I fell. I was able to rest for a bit, clean myself up and made it to work on time.

I pushed the earpieces into my ears real hard and quick once, the metal tubing went through the plastic earpiece and into my ear and perforated my eardrum. If that wasn't bad enough, I blew it off and waited 2 weeks to have it looked at, so a nice infection had time to sprout.

Be careful that you sit right on the middle of the seat on those rolling chairs at the nurses' station; if you sit more to the side the chair may tip quite quickly and throw you onto the floor (ouch.)

And if you're short, it's a better idea to adjust the IV pole's height than try to reach the hook on your own... you might fall down into bed with the patient. Or almost knock down or pull out their IV. Not a good idea...

I pulled this one a couple of weeks ago. While I'm in school working on my BSN, I'm working at a Unit Clerk in a Med/Surg Ward. Anywho, the gist of the story is that the floor is of a very high acuity so the call lights are very busy as are the phones. I had just gotten off a call with a patient (Dementia and called every 5 minutes) when the phone rang so I reached over to the phone to answer it and somehow, don't ask me how as the nurses who saw it don't realize how I did it, bobbled the pickup of the handset. As I bobbled it I tried to recover it but instead of doing that I gave it a bit o' velocity instead. Velocity which was aimed directly at my head. Did I mention that this happened really fast? Or that I didn't even have time to duck and instead watched the pointy end of the handset catch me square across the bridge of my nose so hard that it bounced back onto the desk? Man, that really sucked after my eyes quit watering and the several nurses around me stopped laughing...

Even though I know not to do this - I was running with the crash cart and half-tripped on the power cord, which pulled the defibrillator toward me. Hard to resus a patient when the staff are concussed.

And last week I popped in to fix an IV pump. As I turned 'round I tripped on the (bizarrely long and on the floor) IV tubing, poulling out an insulin infusion from the vein of a long-term diatetic IVDU. I was that popular..